The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. —Archilochus
The Hedgehog and The Fox – Isaiah Berlin
Inspired by a sentence he had heard from an Oxford undergraduate in a common-room parlour game in the 1930’s, Isaiah Berlin turned the phrase (originally Greek) into a great essay on Tolstoy named “The Fox and the Hedgehog.” The phrase divided people into foxes and hedgehogs. It has now passed into culture as a way to classify those around us, and to think of two basic orientations towards reality itself.
The fox not only knows many things, but accepts that he can only know many things, and that the unity of reality must be ungraspable. The critical feature of foxes is that they are reconciled to the limits of what they know.
A hedgehog will not make peace with the world, he is not reconciled. He cannot merely know many things, he wants to know one big thing that will explain reality to him. Foxes settle for the limitations of what they know, and can lead happy lives. Hedgehogs will not settle, and their lives may not be happy.
Each person has elements of both the fox and the hedgehog. We must choose whether to accept the incompleteness of our knowledge or to hold out for truth and certainly. Only a few refuse to come to terms with reality – they refuse to submit,
“They refuse to submit, and seek – whether through art or science, mathematics or philosophy – to pierce through the many disparate things that foxes know, to a core certainty that explains everything.”
The Hedgehog and The Fox – Isaiah Berlin
Karl Marx was an example of such a figure. The grandeur of hedgehogs is that they refuse our limitations, but their tragedy is since they cannot be reconciled to their limitations, they will never be satisfied.
“Tolstoy was ruthlessly dismissive of every available doctrine of truth, whether religious or secular, yet he could not abandon the conviction that some such ultimate truth could be grasped if only he could overcome his own limitations.”
The Hedgehog and The Fox – Isaiah Berlin
Hedgehogs: Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust
Foxes: Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce.
In the business literature, James Collins refers to the hedgehog and the fox in Good to Great. He came up with the Hedgehog Concept: if you want to know how great companies differ from their less successful peers, emulate what their hedgehog style of thinking, which is the intersection of three circles:
- What are you deeply passionate about?
- What you can be best in the world at
- What best drives your economic engine (profit per customer, profit per employee, profit per sale etc.)
Of course, it is impossible to know what you can be the best in the world without practice and feedback. And the idea of being “the best” at anything is suspicious, since it’s such a vague term. It gets even trickier when the sample includes the entire world.
The problem with Good to Great, Built to Last and other books in that genre is that they presume to have discovered what the best strategy looks like by studying companies that have succeeded. There must be value in these books, since they have stood the test of time, but there’s more to the story.
The thinking in these books goes like this: if most of the top companies have X in common, it must be that X is a necessary trait for success. But X can easily be an accidental or inconsequential trait. Countless companies that have failed may have also exhibited the same traits or followed the same strategies.
And in the end, the companies that were used as successful examples in Good to Great failed many years later by following the “hedgehog” strategies.
- Opinion: Surprise: Those ‘great’ companies generally turn out to be meh … or duds
- Good to Great.. to Gone
- The halo effect, and other managerial delusions
But despite the criticism, it is good to remember that companies are not meant to last forever. If a company manages to become successful, even if for a short period of time, that is a great achievement. It isn’t necessary for a company to outperform the market index over many decades for it to be considered great. The reason Collins invites so much criticism is the hubristic titles of his books, and the insinuation that there is a secret that separates the good from the great, from those that survive for a few years, and those that last for decades, and that this secret has been discovered.
It would be more honest to admit that role of randomness and the reality of ‘regression to the mean.’